Hello badartdog and welcome to FineTunedMac,
This was one of the first questions I asked when I first started using a Mac
Firstly, using the Mac OS, we would call it 'repairing permissions'. There is a built-in application to do this called 'Disk Utility' which you can find here ...
'Go' (in your Finder window/main desktop) -> 'Utilities' -> 'Disk Utility'
When you have your 'Disk Utility' application open... select the hard drive icon at the top left of the left hand window. You can then click 'Verify Disk Permissions' followed by 'Repair Disk Permissions'. This may take a while so be patient.
I have also found
this application to be very good and it's
free!
I hope this was of some help to you...
